


Jacked in, Jacked up.

by Sergeant Heretic (2SFlovers)



Category: The Matrix (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 10:46:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3324683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2SFlovers/pseuds/Sergeant%20Heretic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A teenage boy is liberated from the Matrix and finds out that she was never a boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jacked in, Jacked up.

Rodney Boswell always knew something was wrong with him.

He was shorter than most of the other boys, not by very much, but by enough. He was always skinny and weak. He always seemed to get sick, something that worried his parents to no end.

Rodney Boswell was a senior at Central midtown high school. He didn’t play football, he didn’t play basketball and he didn’t care very much about sports in general.

Rodney was always a strange kid. He always sat down to pee, even around other kids, and he never seemed interested in macho stupid stunts.

As a consequence of all of the above, Rodney was the subject of almost constant ridicule from many of the other boys.

“Queer”

“Faggot”

“Nancy-boy”

Rodney didn’t care very much about the opinions of others, because Rodney had bigger problems.

Rodney Boswell was positive he was going crazy and his only solace was his computer and the time he spent hacking and slacking on the internet.

He called himself “Sif” after the Norse goddess. He chose the name because all the cool male Warrior names were taken and it wasn’t as if anyone would know who he was behind that screen. It did not take him long to find out that Sif was actually the Norse mother Earth goddess, but by then he was stuck with it.

Rodney never went in for hacking the school system to fix his grades, he didn’t need to, he was already on the Honor role.

He was also in the Chess club and in the Historical wargaming club. Rodney liked to play the opposing side in wars the U.S. had fought and show how the U.S. could have been defeated.

Several times, he had crushed the American battle fleet at Midway, thrown the D-Day Invasion back into the sea, and thoroughly crushed the Union Army at Gettysburg.

He loved wargaming and netcruising because real life didn’t seem to have any point to it.

Rodney could not explain why, especially to his analyst, but he was convinced that the world he saw and felt and heard was a lie. Rodney could not figure out why, but it was as if the whole world was just a big giant game of pretending that EVERYONE was playing weather they wanted to or not.

One night when Rodney was taking himself to the movies, he saw a woman staring at him. She was dressed strangely in a black skinsuit and knee length boots with a waist length IKE jacket. She looked at him not as if she wanted to sleep with him, but as if she was seeing someone, she knew.

Rodney was about to go in to watch the tepid Steven Segal actioner when he turned from the theater and walked out into the mall.

Rodney Boswell was in a darkened coffee bar playing solitaire when the woman in the IKE jacket sat down across from him.

“Hello, Sif”.

Rodney was so shocked that he dropped his cards and looked at her dumbly, responding,

“What, how, who? I mean how do you,”

“How do I know who you are, how do I know you spend your days coasting through life and your nights searching the net for the answer.?

“Yeah, and wait, what answer?”

The answer to why nothing seems real, the answer to why you don’t care about what happens to you after graduation. The answer to why you think everyone is asleep but you, and the question,”

“What is the Matrix?”

“Yes, Sif.”

Do you know why, I,…”

“Why you feel wrong, why you’re different, why your body doesn’t seem to work the way the other boys’ bodies do? Yes, but it is an answer you are not ready for, not yet.

She then placed a card on the table and left. On the card were a pager number and a name,

Persephone

Rodney knew that name, she was a terrorist, and a thief and the suits wanted her for almost as many crimes as the international terrorist called Morpheus.

Two days went by.

Rodney ate, slept, attended class, did his chores, and cruised the net. He also masturbated in the strange passive way he had developed of rubbing his flaccid penis against his pillow or some other object. Rodney could not get a hard on, but he could still get off after a fashion.

What is the matrix, Rodney asked himself and why was he somehow sure that it was directly connected to why he was so different from other boys?

Why was he so apathetic about real life, and why did his Hacker I.D. of ‘Sif’ feel so much more real than the supposed ‘real world’?

Finally late on the night of the third day, Rodney called the number and left a message. He received an Email to go to the corner of lower Wacker drive and Dearborne St. Then next day he was there and the woman in black was there. Rodney asked her, 

“Who are you?”

“I call myself Switchgate.”

“Hey, you crashed the PMRC website.” 

“That was in another life, before I learned about the world, now come, let us go inside, Persephone is waiting.”

Rodney followed her inside and upstairs, watching her form and thinking about what she probably looked like naked. His penis did not get hard, it never did, instead he felt that odd but good heat down below and the flushing that made him feel relaxed and good.

The building was an old tenement house and was filled with wood paneling and old furniture. When Rodney and Switchgate reached the main lobby on the fifth floor, Rodney saw an Asian woman of indeterminate age in a mandarin dress and wraparound shades sitting in a large leather chair. When he came in, she stood and said,

Hello, Sif. I am glad to finally meet you.”

“Uh, Hi, yeah, you’re Persephone, right? I heard of you.”

“And I you, I am amazed that you are still alive and so demonstrably functional.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That is something that must be seen, but you are not ready.”

Persephone spoke to Rodney in ambiguous, almost philosophical terms about reality, and perception and dreams and the strange thing was, that Rodney understood her. The world felt like a dream that Rodney could not wake up from and he knew it had something to do with ‘The Matrix’.

And she kept calling him ‘Sif’.

As if THAT was his real name and ‘Rodney Boswell’ was just an alias

“You know, that something is very wrong, Sif. You know the world, and even your own self are not right. Something is very wrong, and with you it is even more pronounced.. You are a slave but worse, you are a mistake.”

“So what’s going on, what’s wrong with me and what the hell is wrong with the world?”

“I cannot answer that. Not yet, all I can do is offer you a choice.” 

She then opened a small Chinese black lacquered cupboard and took out a small tray; it held what looked like two cold medicine gel caplets. One was red, and the other blue.

“If you take the blue pill you wake up tomorrow and go to school and Rodney Boswell goes on to live the rest of his life, for whatever that is worth. If you instead take the red pill then you will find out what is wrong with everything, and you will learn that nothing is wrong with you. You will learn what the Matrix is, and what it did to you.”

Rodney leaned forward and Persephone told him warningly,

“There is no turning back, once you make your choice, it is irrevocable.”

Rodney reached forward and after a moment’s thought picked up the red pill, then he put it in his mouth and drank down two mouthfuls of water to wash it down. When he had done so, Persephone stood and told him,

“Come, We don’t have a great deal of time now.”

Rodney followed her into the second room and found it full of old style almost retro computer technology and other electronics that looked like they dated from the early sixties. There were several more women and two guys in the room as well Switchgate, Persephone, and two other women and two men. They sat Rodney down and attached several medical sensor leads to him. As he sat there. He started to feel strange and even more disconnected than usual. He felt almost as if he was about to come loose from his own body. Rodney looked over at a painting that seemed to be torn up but as he looked at it, the tears flowed together and sealed themselves. Rodney reached out and touched the painting to see if he was imagining things, and the acrylic colors came off on his fingers and started to spread up his hand and arm. As that happened the others were talking,

“What have you got, do you have a location?”

“Working, his source code is all jacked up, I don’t even understand the readings I’m getting.”

“I expected that, just trace the program and ignore the bios if you can.”

I don’t get this, it’s almost like the kid’s a,…”

“Shut up.”

Then Persephone took out a cell phone and asked the persons on the other end,

“Have you got a fix, where is the location?”

As all of this happened the colors covered Rodney and then went up his face and into his mouth. Rodney blacked out.

The last words he heard were Switchgate shouting,

“GOT HER!”

Rodney opened his eyes.

He was in a thick pinkish red fluid and there were,…things, chords and leads all over him. And something was in his mouth and stuck down his throat. Nothing felt right and all he knew was that he wanted, no needed to get out of there. Rodney reached up franticly to penetrate the membrane that was over top of him. After a bit of struggling his hands broke the membrane and he sat up. Then he used both hands to pull that,…thing out of his throat and mouth.

Rodney looked up and then down and then all around. There were hundreds, no, thousands, no more like hundreds of thousands of these kinds of coffin like capsules, each holding a naked man or woman. They all looked dead to the world and as unaware as he had once been. Then Rodney looked down at himself and saw a female body. A woman’s naked body covered in goo and as hairless as a babe. Just as Rodney was trying to process why he was in this bizarre hellscape and why he had a woman’s body, a spiderlike thing, some kind of multi armed robot swooped down and grabbed his neck as it fixed it’s monocular eye on him. When it did so, there was something that unscrewed from the back of his head and came out. And as that happened the various leads disconnected from his legs and arms and body with a strange pneumatic hiss and pop. When that happened, Rodney was literally flushed out of the capsule as if he were a turd in a toilet.

Sluicing down the long strange pipe, Rodney fell into a moat of filthy brackish water and was convinced he was going to drown.

As Rodney floundered helplessly trying to swim and failing, a ship or a flying machine of some kind hovered overhead and snaked down a multi finger claw. Then it plucked him from the water and pulled him into the ship.

The strange metal claw lifted him into the big flying machine and several people placed him on a table and covered his now female nakedness with a blanket.

“Did I die?”

“Just the opposite.”

“How come my eyes hurt?”

“Because, Sif, you’ve never used them before.”

One woman who looked like one of the women from the room said,

“A boy in the Matrix, a girl in the real world, sweet Jesus, the machines truly screwed the pooch on this one.”

The lead woman, Rodney saw looked like Persephone, but she looked far less polished and stylish and was dressed in what looked like handmade work clothes or something. Said, 

“It happens more often than you think.” Switchgate asked, 

“What do you mean, Persephone?”

“It’s called Gender Dysphoria, and it’s what happens when the Matrix experiences a glitch that makes it think a person of one gender is a person of the opposite gender. It does not happen very often, but it happens often enough. Most of the time it happens because the Machines think a female baby is a male.”

“Shit, so the big scary machines can’t even tell boys from girls, now?”

“Sometimes, not. It’s not even one in one thousand, but it happens. The matrix is so large and requires so much computer power and calculation that glitches, mistakes bad code, are inevitable. It’s just that we’ve never liberated one before.” 

Rodney could not believe anything he was hearing, then he thought, no, he wasn’t Rodney, He was not even a ‘he’ was he? ‘Rodney Boswell was a lie, just another part of the made up bullshit world of the Matrix.

Sif, sat in the bunkroom in the strange flying ship, thinking about his, no, not his, thinking about her situation. The Matrix, thought she was a boy. She lived as a boy for sixteen years, Even now she thought like a boy. She had not been transformed into a girl; she always had been female, all her life. It was just that the Matrix, the digital lie made her think she was a boy.

If the Matrix was a lie, if nothing about the real world was like that, then where was she? What was the real world, what was really going on? Sif needed answers and she needed them right now. There was still an I.V. needle jacked into her left forearm, so she carefully unlinked it and pulled it out. Her problem was that she still thought in male terms, she still thought of herself as a boy. Sif had no idea if that would ever go away.

The door or hatch or whatever opened and Persephone entered. She looked at Sif and didn’t speak for a few moments, then she said,

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For taking you away from who you thought you were?”

“Then why did you?” Sif’s question was at the same time wondering and accusatory.

“We freed you because, we need you. We need your military mind and you gift for strategy and tactics. We needed you while you were still young enough to rescue, before you mind fully accepted the lie of the Matrix.”

“I need to know more, I need to know what happened what is the Matrix for, who made it why did they make it, what is going on?”

“Well no doubt you think it is 1999, is that correct?”

“Yeah, when I was in, that thing, I thought it was 1999, you’re telling me it’s not?”

“Sif, as near as we can guess, the year is closer to 21 or 2299. even at that, we don’t know for sure. Come with me, there is something I need to show you.”

Persephone led Sif out into the main deck of the flying ship. Sif saw the nameplate and read it. According to that plate, she was aboard the “Gnosis” It listed the ship as a vessel of “Zion” and the Captain was listed as “Persephone.”

Sif, knew that ‘gnosis’ was a word that meant ‘knowledge of god’ or something like that. An odd name for a ship, to be sure.

I am the Captain of this ship, the Gnosis. This is my crew. Switchgate, you know. This is Phone Phreak,’ A latin American looking boy with frizzy hair, “Zero Cool” A tall statuesque woman with cropped blonde hair, “ “Fugue” An African American looking woman with bleached white hare in dreadlocks. “Sellblock” An Indian looking woman “Spearpoint” an Irish looking woman with a flaming read topnot “and this is our ship’s operator, Rampart. The last was a big Nordic looking man that looked like the stunt double for the Terminator. They all nodded at her, and some of them answered, 

“Hey, Sif,”

“ Hi, Sif,”

“ Welcome aboard, Sif”

The last crewmember was an Italian looking man named ‘Torque’. He was the weapon’s officer aboard the Gnosis. The last two men had no jacks or plugs in their arms and Sif guessed no jacks in the backs of their heads. Sif wondered where they came from but before she could ask, Persephone told her, 

“Have a seat; we have a lot to go over.

Switchgate and Phone Phreak buckled her into the chair and leaned her head back into the donut shaped headrest. Then someone behind her shoved SOMETHING sharp and pointy into the back of her head and Sif was suddenly,…somewhere else. She was also a ‘he’ again. Rodney looked down to see his old male form. ‘he’ asked,

“Hey, what gives, I’m a guy again?”

Persephone, back in her slicked up dragon lady guise, told him,

“That is a residual digital self image. It’s who you thought you were in the Matrix, restored temporarily here, in this digital construct.”

“Yeah, I was just about to ask about that.”

‘he’ said, looking around at the white formless featureless nether place in which ‘he’ found ‘himself’

Persephone smiled and answered,

“We use this to generate anything we might need, weapons, and tools training environments what have you. It’s not the Matrix, but it operates by the same laws.”

“But it looks so,…”

“Real?”

“Yeah,…”

“Reality is a matter of perception, Sif. What is ‘real’ how do you know? You see something, touch something taste something, and so to you, it is ‘real’ but ‘reality’ is just a matter of the electrical sensor information being fed to your brain.”

From seemingly nowhere, two easy chairs appeared and in front of them sat a large old furniture console television. Persephone was sitting in one and Sif sat down in the other.

“This is the world you knew. The world as it was at the end of the 20th century.” Sif looked at ‘he’ saw a city scape, people going to and fro, cars on busy streets, and many other images of mankind’s great empire of technological normalcy. Persephone continued, clicking the channel changer to show a different image.

 

“This is the world as it is now.”

Sif looked and saw a dark blasted landscape of rubble and craggy earth and grey tumultuous skies that knew no sun. Then suddenly ‘he’ was in that tormented ruined landscape with Persephone, 

This, Sif, is the reality of the cursed Earth.

Sif looked around aghast at the horror of what ‘he’ was looking at,

“What happened, who did this, aliens, did Earth get invaded?”

“No, nothing so fantastical as that. The reality, if you’ll excuse my use of the term is actually quite mundane. You see, Sif, at the end of the 20th century and in the first half of the 21st century, humankind finally united as one and gave birth to our crowning achievement. We created artificial sentience. We created cybernetic beings that were aware of themselves and that could and did think for themselves. We don’t know who drew first blood, but we do know it was humanity that darkened the skies.”

“But, why?” ‘He’ asked incredulous.

“At the time, the machines were dependent on solar power, and humanity was losing the war. We thought depriving them of their primary power source would turn the tide. The machines just found an,…alternate power source.”

Sif did not take long to catch on.

“Us. They use the heat energy and electrical energy in human bodies” 

Sif looked sad and sick and as if, the weight of the world was now on ‘his’ shoulders. Persephone told ‘him’

“After all the decades of humans being dependent on machines to live, the tables are now turned. History, it would seem is not without a sense of irony.”

“So, the Matrix?’

“Is the means of control, Sif. The means of keeping multitudes of humans not only in bondage, but totally unaware that they are in a state of enslavement.”

The rest of the information came as a sad sick non-surprise. The fields of humans grown as if they were crops of plants, the feeding of the liquefied dead to the living via the food and oxygen throat umbilical’s, the blatant transformation of the human race into blind deaf and dumb power batteries.

Sif believed all of it, because it explained everything, it made sense. It was the simplest and most direct explanation for everything. Sif sat there nearly catatonic from the revelation and then the interface spike was pulled from her skull and she was led back to her room.

Her parents weren’t real, they probably weren’t even her parents, in fact they had probably never even met each other in the real world. Her whole life, everything, school, her friends, were all lies, a digital fantasy created by a cybernetic slavemaster to turn her and everyone else into a damned Energizer battery.

Sif spent the rest of the day, and the entire night sitting and stewing over what she had learned.

The hatch to her cabin opened as the overhead illumination brightened and Hammer, the ship’s Operator walked in. He asked her jovially,

“How did you sleep?”

“I didn’t.”

He looked at her and told her confidently,

“You will tonight, I guarantee it!”

Sif looked at him as if noticing him for the first time and asked,

“Hey, where are all the hookajoops all over you?”

“I don’t have any, Sif I was never in the Matrix.”

“You came from that “Zion” place, wherever that is.”

“Yes, Ma’am, I was born free in the last human city. Me and Torque both.”

“Where is it?”

“Down deep near the core of the planet where geothermal energy can still heat it and power it. If the war were over tomorrow, Zion is where the party would be.

Now, come on, Sif,”

Hammer continued,

“We’ve got a lot of stuff to go over.”

**Author's Note:**

> The Sarge has passed away. Her stories will remain to entertain and delight, but there will be no more.


End file.
